> Folks care because their bottom line is impacted in a time when it’s already hard to make ends meet every month due to rising costs of food, gas, and utilities, not because of some unnamed boogeyman in the form of a “nation state competitor”

While agreeing with where you're coming from, including this, it is also worth nothing that there is truth to what you're rejecting as well. Our longstanding unsolved domestic problems are fertile ground for nation state competitors to foment discontent, gain oppositional mindshare, and ultimately harm our overall position. The elites seem to think these problems can just be ignored or swept under the rug, when in reality the frustration grows until it boils over into highly destructive self-owns. We're already seeing this actively play out on a grand scale with general politics, but it can certainly happen in more specific ways that target things like data centers.

To be industrially competitive we need to fix our longstanding domestic problems that fall on individuals, rather than merely ignoring them. In the case of data centers - lack of effective environmental regulations around air and sound pollution, complete inability for municipalities to regulate the operations of something after it's been built, and a shortage of infrastructure that's now been privatized for use by the highest bidder.

Plus that general affordability crisis you touched upon, of course. Nobody likes the feeling that an appendage of a trillion dollar company can come to their city, wave around the promise of everything-bubble money, and make it so their own individual voice is meaningless.